A Time Traveller and a Poet Do a Ridiculous Thing. Of Course They Do!
Interview with Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins’ time-travelling work has been inspiring millions of people since he started the Transition Towns movement decades ago from his hometown of Totnes. His latest book, How To Fall In Love With The Future is one of our highly recommended reads.
In this feature-length interview, Rob talks with Bending The Arc co-editor Alice Willitts about the possible futures awaiting realisation, about channelling frustration into positive action, and how sweet the beer of 2030 tastes. In their conversation, they journey into a possible Cambridge of 2030, where people have put planet first, have earth-positive policies, compassionate economics and social structures that foster meaningful connections with nature. Rob and Alice visit a version of the future that is still possible if we do everything, everything we can now.
“You’re a shikake!” may sound like an insult but a shikake is in fact a device for changing behaviour through fun design, as defined by Professor Naohiro Matsumura. It’s pronounced shi-ka-ke (not to be confused with delicious shi-ta-ke mushroom) and I reckon that climate activist and author, Rob Hopkins, might just be a human shikake. Rob’s work makes alternative futures visible in ways that you can’t believe you didn’t see before, even though they were right there in front of you all along…
Rob: Well, when you build a time machine device, it’s clear that there are many different quantum threads that stretch off into the future, to many different futures. And there are some, the ones that are the result of us doing everything we possibly, possibly could have done now, that are the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring places to visit.
Alice: Agreed, so in this one of many possible 2030s, I’m thinking about ordinary things like the bicycles. I remember being in China twenty years ago and bicycles dominated the roads in a way I thought could never happen here, and now, in Cambridge, it’s so normal! I can’t believe the difference in just a few short years. I love it!
Rob: What do you love about it?
Alice: Oh, well on my commute, I talk to my neighbours, because we’re right next to each other on our bikes, right? So the sound of rush hour is actually chatter and music. We’ve got every kind of wheels out, I’ve got a new wheelchair trike, there’s people being cycle-chauffeured, electric bikes, tiny tots on pushalongs, mobility scooters. There’s even a ‘meeting bike’ I’ve seen around town which you can hire for your meeting so everyone gets fresh air while working. They sit round a long desk and pedal underneath. The innovation is incredible. I know Cambridge is a peak cycle-city but I hear it’s similar in other places too.
Rob: Bicycle rush hour is so spectacular in so many places that actually a lot of people who don’t have to get up and go to work, people who are retired, whatever, they bring their chairs out and watch it going past. You could say, ‘oh it’s just a bunch of bicycles’ but every one of those bicycles holds different stories and different sounds, from children in cargo bikes being taken to school and chatting to each other, to people cycling with their headphones singing like karaoke but who cares! They don’t have to worry about being a bit of a berk in front of other people because they’ll be with a whole bunch of different people in about ten seconds!
Alice: Yeah, it’s kind of weirdly ecstatic. We live between two schools and the primary school children go to school in this long bike-disco. Each school has a member of staff leading and they pick kids up with, like, what would you call it? A bike bus? There used to be a lot of traffic on our road and that made it dangerous for little kids on bicycles. But now, I hear the drumbeat from down the road and all these voices shouting lyrics and everyone else makes space for them, right? They’re basically dancing their way to school on their bikes. So everyone wants to be in that, it’s so fun and it brightens my morning.
Rob: I really like that and I remember in 2018 when I was doing the research for ‘From What Is to What If’ I went to visit a street in Bristol where they were doing Playing Out, which is a way of bringing people out to meet. People could close their streets and the kids could play, and I was talking to one of the dads and he said, “Well, after doing this for about six months, we realised that we actually all quite like each other.”
In the ‘50s, ‘60s and even ‘70s in some places, the streets were full of children playing and then in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they all sort of retreated inside. But here we are again, it’s the kids playing outside that’s brought the adults together.
It’s the scale of the change in city authorities that’s impressive too, starting where they did with everything separated into different silos, with a mental health strategy here and a housing strategy there and a criminal justice strategy over there. No recognition that actually 70% of young men who ended up in prison were homeless in the six months before they were imprisoned.
Likewise, most people sectioned under the Mental Health Act had some experience with homelessness or couldn’t afford to feed their families. All of that stuff is tied in together but used to be kept deliberately separate.
Alice: Yeah, we were always told before that it was “all too expensive”, that there was never any money, that the council was in debt. But in 2027 we voted in a Regional Assembly. So instead of having these segmented, party-political authorities of South Cambridge, North Cambridge, Peterborough and Cambridgeshire we just have the one Regional Assembly with rotating reps from all the demographics. You know, Cambridge city has always been very cosmopolitan and brings in people from all over the world who come here to work in the biotech sector and University. But in the countryside around we’re the breadbasket of the UK, right? The Regional Assembly has brought farmers right into the heart of connection with the city. Now most of the food on our tables comes from the region. Policymaking has completely shifted attitudes, giving respect to rural communities. And it’s a no-brainer, right?
Rob: At the foundation of the Cambridge Food Belt in 2027, you built that intentional food belt around the city. And you know, if you want to reconnect the city to the land around it you need to put certain infrastructure in place. Even if people in Cambridge and Peterborough wanted to eat local grains, they couldn’t because the infrastructure wasn’t there.
Alice: That made our food situation very vulnerable to global fluctuations or drought, so yes, that Food Belt move was massive. And now, Cambridge Market, which don’t forget the previous city authority had been working to close, is absolutely thrumming. It’s full of producers. We used to have one local vegetable farmer, Simon, but on a Sunday morning only. People queued round the block but that’s not practical for feeding a city. Now, thirty growers have their market stalls staffed by municipal employees, open early morning and late evening. So, after work, we can all go and get our produce from our local farmers, basically. There’s all the bike deliveries as well. It’s thriving.
Rob: When these belts work, the spin-offs are amazing, challenging people to be innovative and come up with all sorts of ideas. The chefs and the food producers then start collaborating and making really interesting products. You know, I was in Cambridge the other week, I had a beer there, I’ve never tasted anything like that anywhere else, made with local herbs and some hops grown locally. The brewers are using local grains so innovation has taken place because imagination loves limits, basically.
When there are some limits, people are so much more imaginative than they would otherwise be. The kind of flour that’s grown around Cambridge, which is quite particular to that area, has qualities that you don’t get anywhere else.
Alice: Well, also we’re growing quinoa — oh, have you tried the quinoa cheeses yet?! Hodmedods started the trend but now other farmers are getting involved. They’re growing specific kinds of maize they’ve bred for the higher temperatures. We’ve always had very low rainfall in the East of the UK and that’s still an issue. So even staples like bread are being made from maize and all these other kinds of grains and seeds which, by the way, is great for me as someone with Coeliac’s Disease! Buckwheat, which is in the rhubarb family believe it or not, is doing so well in the East because of deep tap roots and being a perennial crop. In fact, it might have been a Buck’s that you had a pint of the other day.
Rob: You could well be right. Rings a bell. Are there other breweries though?
Alice: Two local brewers, Red Poll Brewery and Buck’s Brewery are absolutely caning it at the moment! Part of their success is they’ve opened up the farms to residents, so you can volunteer. Some people volunteer their time from home, to help the farmers with marketing, telling their stories to locals. There are also special farm days and the chefs come in and they cook all the food. Stuff that Riverford was doing like 20 years ago but now it’s mainstream. It’s really normal and I love that. The city feels connected to the land around it — and we’re feeding everyone, everyone. The last food bank closed five months ago.
Rob: The thing that gets me is, five years ago, one in four single mothers was going hungry to feed their children, and a third of all women in this country were living in poverty. There was amazing food but it was certainly not available to everybody.
And so this shift in terms of food was rooted in social justice and the belief that everybody should have access to good food. It’s been such a change, with schools and colleges and now the NHS has a functioning food prescribing service. I really didn’t think we’d get here but to say that everybody has access to good, healthy food is real.
Alice: Was that really only five years ago? So much has happened, Rob! For Cambridge in particular there’s been this motivation for radical change, out of shame I think. You know how earlier I said there’s been this big regional policy decision. Well actually, shame is a great motivator. Being one of the wealthiest cities outside London and having so many people who could not feed their families. I think the discrepancy of living like that just became unbearable.
Rob: It did, yeah. And you remember the council did a thing where they proposed their vision for Cambridge, which came out of citizen’s assemblies, so it was rooted in imagination. It was such a thrilling future that they painted, so that when they offered people the opportunity to pay more council tax than they otherwise would do to achieve it, people did. The key was making it a voluntary opt-in thing. If you’re able to pay more and you’re inspired by this vision, you had the means to make it happen. They’ve been blown away by the number of people who make the contributions.
Alice: That was largely down to some really great storytelling. You know, they brought artists and storytellers in when they set up the regional assembly. Did you know that?
Rob: I’m familiar with those kinds of immersive environments. People can come and sort of experience what it might be like before it happens. I think that was really powerful in changing some councillor’s minds, actually, about how they would vote and what decisions they would make.
Alice: Just going back to the voluntary council tax contributions for a moment, I read the other day in our fantastic local paper, the Cambridge Independent — it’s great by the way, everybody uses it for what’s happening, where you can get things, exchanges and meet ups — anyway, I read that the council are phasing out the voluntary contribution now because they’ve managed to get enough in the coffers for current plans. It went to the vote and the residents have agreed to a permanent rise. The whole system is totally transparent and because there’s no party politics in it, we just get straight information about where the money’s going. The assembly administers the funds. I think it’s rolling out in four other cities next year, that’s what the article said anyway.
Rob: Proof, in other words that the early adopters, the people who say, “Yeah, okay, let’s try the vision,” mean shifts in attitude become so popular that the majority follow. They feel okay about paying more because the results are tangible. The conversation moves from taxation to value. People are more interested in what happens: “Okay, I don’t mind paying more on my council tax if this is the world we get to live in.”
Writers have always had the pleasure of creating the world they long for and seeing it live in others before it becomes reality. When the survival of everything you love, all the people you know, depends on the power of human imagination, stories are not frivolous luxuries; story, poetry and the power of imagination become foundational.
For thrutopians, the problem of not being able to imagine a future centred on compassion, solidarity and care is solved by imagining it. The problem of clinging to a destructive way of life is solved by imagining a better life. If you’re anything like every other human on the planet, you might find it hard to believe something’s possible until you can actually experience another way working.
“I’ve been at this a long time,” Rob says, “and I don’t know what works but I do know that what we’ve been doing up till now hasn’t worked enough because we’re losing the wonderful future we could have. When we wrote the Transition Handbook in 2007 we thought we could do it with rapid change and if we had started then it would’ve been so easy! Now, the line on the graph is practically perpendicular so what we need to do is huge. It’s immensely frustrating.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that even this visionary leader gets frustrated but if anyone holds the beacon of hope aloft, it’s this patient, long-game player. So many people have benefited from his inventiveness. If you think you’re on a path to destruction, he’s the telescope on a bend enticing you to look for a different path.
“What I try and do,” he says, “is just keep bringing people back from doom, repeating what we have to do: rapid phase out of meat, rapid phase out of fossil fuels. This is what the climate scientist Peter Kalmus calls ‘emergency mode’ but I’ve said to him, ‘Peter that’s an awful name for it, no-one’s going to sign up to that!’ We need a reframing to call it Thrilling Adventure mode, Delicious Opportunity mode, Ride of our Lives mode!”
Shikake! Yes! Thrilling Adventure mode, please!
Calling the revolution ‘A Thrilling Adventure’ points to how joy and longing can be the device to catch your attention and get you running towards action. Positive activism is a marathon, after all. Sprinters of utopia might get quick glories but the slog of changing society needs patient, diligent and determined visionaries who know how to draw us towards what’s best for us.
A shikake shows us a more delightful way to see what’s around us without revealing its primary purpose. Colourful footprints on the floor will guide shoppers without telling them where to walk. Likewise, placing a basketball hoop over a bin or painting a staircase with piano keys that play a tune, or sticking a bullseye on a urinal bowl are all devices that shape actions. The same could be said for a Fortune Telling Machine in the corridors of power dishing out doses of Earth-positive predictions that are not only achievable but desirable too.
Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes, and author of several books including The Transition Handbook and, most recently, How to Fall in Love with the Future: a Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World. He is an Ashoka Fellow, has spoken at TED Global and at several TEDx events, and appeared in the 2015 French film phenomenon Demain. He holds a PhD from the University of Plymouth as well as 2 Honoris Causas, and hosted 100 episodes of his podcast ‘From What If to What Next’. In November 2022 he was made an Honorary Citizen of Liège in Belgium. His collaborative music project with artist Mr Kit, ‘Field Recordings from the Future‘ is now available, and is being developed as a live show which will tour in 2026. Rob stopped flying in 2006. In his spare time, he draws and makes drypoint etchings. His website is robhopkins.net.
Shikake: the Japanese Art of Shaping Behaviour Through Design, by Naohiro Matsumura, (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021)
How to Fall In Love With The Future: a Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing The World, by Rob Hopkins, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2025)
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of the Imagination to Create the Future We Want, by Rob Hopkins, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020)
Well that hits - manifesting intensely. Thank you Alice and Rob.